26 March 2008

Gartner identified nine key areas in which chief information officers (CIOs) can significantly reduce costs during 2008 as they continue to support data management and integration-related initiatives:

1. Perform operational database consolidation: through consolidation of redundant databases and database workloads, organisations have the opportunity to positively impact costs. In the typical large enterprise, these cost components can range in aggregate from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars. Consolidation activities can potentially reduce these costs by 10% to 25% or more in some cases.

2. Optimise data integration tools licensing: large organisations tend to have multiple tools and techniques that they use to achieve data integration goals. Through consolidation of overlapping and redundant tools, organisations can reduce software license and maintenance costs associated with data integration tools, while also enabling a lower investment in acquiring and maintaining the skills to operate the tools.

With typical investment in data integration tools falling in the range of $200 000 to $500 000 for software licensing and $50 000 to $100 000 for annual maintenance, organisations can achieve software cost savings of $250 000 or more through consolidating tools or replacing tools with lower-cost options.

3. Leverage established data structures and data integration process: development of databases and data integration processes consumes a significant amount of time and effort. Traditionally, most organisations have been poor at achieving leverage and re-use of the data-related assets that they have built in the past. By forcing project teams to prove they cannot leverage established artifacts before endeavoring to create new ones, organisations can significantly reduce the costs of implementation efforts by dramatically increasing levels of re-use.

4. Perform data mart consolidation: consolidating siloed data marts into a single data warehouse or into a smaller set of marts, delivers the same types of benefits as operational database consolidation, but also reduces cost and complexity of the data integration processes feeding the marts. By streamlining these data integration processes, organisations can save approximately 50% of the total cost allocated to supporting their disparate data marts if they consolidate those marts into an application-neutral data warehouse.

5. Enforce standards to foster re-use and agility: Gartner sees a significant trend toward organisations enforcing corporate standards for the use of tools (database management systems, data integration and data quality tools), schema design, naming conventions and various other dimensions of data management, which increases the ability of teams to collaborate and increases agility by enabling easier re-allocation of personnel across teams. These advantages reduce costs of implementation efforts while also allowing the organisation to reduce skills and training costs since there are fewer skill sets to be supported.

6. Defer replacement of custom-coded architectures: the effort required to migrate away from custom code can be a significant expense on top of the software licensing costs of the tools themselves. Organisations can potentially defer these migrations if custom coded processes are meeting business needs and working appropriately today. Investment in new tools can also drive benefits, and should still be considered for new initiatives. However, deferring purchases of data integration tools will generally result in software licensing cost avoidance in the range of $100 000 to $500 000.

7. Explore open source licensing: a significant component of IT budgets aligned with data management and integration initiatives goes toward software licensing and maintenance. Organisations continue to seek ways to reduce these costs, and increasingly look toward alternative models for software licensing, including open source licensing in which software users incur no upfront licensing costs at all.

8. Renegotiate services contracts: many organisations leverage external services to augment their skills and staff when undertaking data management and integration initiatives. IT contracts with tactical deliverables should bundle planning and design services as a part of a single comprehensive implementation service, as compared with separate services contracts. Up to $150 000 to $300 000 of design services could be reduced in end-to-end consolidated service contracts.

9. Defer low-priority/limited benefit projects: organisations with an effective IT planning and budgeting process have a good sense of which projects or investments represent the largest potential positive impact on the business. In times when budgets are tightening, CIOs can assist in reducing IT spending by identifying and deferring to a later date those investments that have a low priority because of low potential return on investment. Specifically, organisations should limit their investment in database infrastructure, data integration activities, data quality improvement, data warehousing and other areas to those items which directly support revenue generation (or other important quantified business benefits).

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Master data management (MDM) is an enterprise-wide approach that encompasses all corporate data, both operational and analytic, helping both IT and business to rationalise overlapping and conflicting data in disparate systems, driving data consistency and quality across functional business